Though the oneness of a common blood and a common speech was recognized by all we find no traces of any common action or common rule.
Even in the two groups of kingdoms, the five English and the five Saxon kingdoms, which occupied Britain south of the Humber, the relations of each member of the group to its fellows seem to have been merely local.
It was only locally that East and West and South and North English were grouped round the Middle English of Leicester, or East and West and South and North Saxons round the Middle Saxons about London.

In neither instance do we find any real trace of a confederacy, or of the rule of one member of the group over the others; while north of the Humber the feeling between the Englishmen of Yorkshire and the Englishmen who had settled towards the Firth of Forth was one of hostility rather than of friendship.

But this age of isolation, of equality, of independence, had now come to an end.

The progress of the conquest had drawn a sharp line between the kingdoms of the conquerors.

The work of half of them was done.